LONDON (Bloomberg) -- A new window of opportunity has been opened in the world of hedge funds, traditionally the preserve of aggressive institutional investors.

The Helix Group of Funds, Bermuda-incorporated and Dublin-listed, allows smaller investors to participate in the world of high-risk, high-return investment.

"Until now, hedge funds were the investment industries' last great secret,'' Helix Group of Funds director Paul Gleeson said.

"With the arrival of Helix, barriers to investment in these vehicles have been removed for smaller investors.'' Launched last week, Helix is part of Union CAL Ltd., a fully owned subsidiary of Union Plc, the financial services group established in 1885 that has about $1.5 billion of assets under management.

The structure of Helix is known as a multi-share class hedge fund, meaning that investors can switch monthly, at no charge, between three alternative vehicles, the Helix Global Leverage Fund, the Helix Currency Fund and the Helix Volatility Fund.

The investment objective of the Helix fund family is to achieve total annual returns of 30 percent by investing in a wide range of liquid futures markets, including bonds, metals, currencies, energy and agriculture.

The fund also seeks to take advantage of both rising and falling markets, utilising computer trading models developed over the last ten years.

"We firmly believe these initial classes offer investors a good spread of hedge strategies with varying degrees of risk-reward profiles,'' Mr. Gleeson, who has overall responsibility for the funds' investments, said.

Based on a computer trading model, the Helix Global Leverage Fund specialises in a core group of commodity-based derivative instruments. It takes alternative bets in favour of rising and falling prices, thus adjusting the risk profile of its underlying investment pool. Its goal is to provide investors with high absolute returns.

Focused on the interbank spot and forward currency foreign exchange market, the Helix Currency Fund's investment decisions are driven by so-called "technical'' analysis of forex price charts. It strives to achieve consistent low volatility growth.

The most aggressive of the three, the Helix Volatility Fund, invests in as many as 25 different markets across a wide range of futures and options instruments. The philosophy is to enter futures and options positions when volatility is low, riding an increase in volatility, which generally boosts the value of options. When risk gets too high, options are sold at a profit and new investments are sought.

The objective is to achieve a "robust'' rate of return, Mr. Gleeson said.

An option is a contract that provides the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell a specific security or commodity within a predetermined time period at a certain price. Volatility is the extent to which a security's price fluctuates back and forth within a short period of time.

Given its September 1 launch date, the Helix Group of Funds has not had time to establish much of a track record. Still, the trading systems employed by the three alternative share classes have operated over the last several years, providing examples, but no guarantee, of the type of historical returns that may be achieved by the fund in the future.

As of August 22, the trading system that provides the backbone of the Helix Global Leverage Fund had generated a net return of 72.4 percent since October 1993. This compared to a growth rate of 39.4 percent on the benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 Index over the same period.

Since August, 1990, the trading system underlying the Helix Currency Fund has generated net returns of 107.2 percent, compared to a growth rate of 65.1 percent for the Morgan Stanley Capital International's World Index during the same period.

The system employed in the Helix Volatility Fund has generated a net of 63.6 percent, going back to January 1993, which compares to a 53.9 percent return for the S&P 500 index during the same period.

Mr. Gleeson has overall responsibility for the tracking and selection of the assets in the Helix Fund share classes. He is also marketing director at Union Cal and selects individual managers for the Helix Fund share classes.

Since joining Union CAL in 1990, Mr. Gleeson has had responsibility for structuring and developing investment products, in particular tracking, seeding and analysing the performance of more than 40 global fund managers that have worked under him on various Union CAL funds.

He began investing in metals and commodities in 1974 with Rudolf Wolff, which later changed its name to Gourlay Wolff. He moved on to Shearson in Australia, where he worked for several years, before joining Union CAL.

Mr. Gleeson is supported by Philip O'Neill, associated director at Union CAL, who is focused on the development of investment funds. Mr. O'Neill has been at Union CAL since 1988, after working for the London Commodity Exchange in 1986.

Shares in the Helix Group of Funds are quoted in U.S. dollars.

The group is quick to warn that investment in the Helix Group of Funds can fluctuate in value and may result in the investor getting back less than the amount initially invested.